Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday accused Republicans of holding up crucial assistance to Ukraine in order to protect the Koch brothers.

Because of course they did.

Listen, we’re not exactly unfamiliar with the old “pick a scapegoat and blame them for all of society’s woes”, so we know what’s going on here (and so do the Democrat National Socialists having, after all, written the book on the subject. Sadly, their voters, being too dumb to chew butter, don’t), but at some point it just starts getting silly.

What should one call idjits terminally stoopid enough to fall for the Democrat National Socialists’ silly “it’s all the Koch Bros. Fault!” game?

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This will tell you. A GREAT article about them, from Forbes Magazine. Read it, and you’ll see why the Leftwing nutjobs hate them so passionately. (Their name is pronounced “Coke.”)

Charles Koch’s many critics on the left–including the President of the United States–accuse him of accumulating too much power and using it to promote his own economic interests through a network of secretive organizations they call the “Kochtopus.” Ironically, the Koch brothers believe they’re fighting against power, at least in the political realm.

For the Kochs, the real power is central government, which can tax entire industries into oblivion, force a citizen to buy health insurance and bring mighty corporations like Koch Industries to heel.

“Most power is power to coerce somebody,” says Charles, in a voice that sounds like Jimmy Stewart with a Kansas twang. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

The November 2012 elections–which David, in a separate interview shortly after the results were finalized, termed “bitterly disappointing”–seem to confirm Charles’ last point. Not even the Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions of dollars during this election cycle (they won’t disclose the exact amount) funding direct political contributions and issue-driven “nonprofits,” could coerce voters to back their candidates. Mitt Romney’s loss was a huge blow to them, both in terms of likely policy outcomes and personal reputation.

But those who think the brothers, older and chastened, will now fade away, don’t understand the Kochs. Not a bit. Obama’s victory was just a blip on a master plan measured in decades, not election cycles.

“We raised a lot of money and mobilized an awful lot of people, and we lost, plain and simple,” says David. “We’re going to study what worked, what didn’t work, and improve our efforts in the future. We’re not going to roll over and play dead.”

The goal has always been, Charles says, “true democracy,” where people “can run their own lives and choose what they want to buy, choose how to spend their money.”

(“Now in our democracy you elect somebody every two to four years and they tell you how to run your life,” he says.)

Both Kochs innately understand that–unlike the populist appeal of their fellow midwestern billionaire Warren Buffett and his tax-the-rich advocacy – their message of pure, raw capitalism is a much tougher sell, even among capitalists.

So their revolution has been an evolution, with roots going back half a century to Koch’s first contributions to libertarian causes and Republican candidates. In the mid-1970s their business of changing minds got more formal when Charles cofounded what became the Cato Institute, the first major libertarian think tank. Based in Washington, it has 120 employees devoted to promoting property rights, educational choice and economic freedom.

In 1978 the brothers helped found – and still fund – George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, the go-to academy for deregulation; they have funded the Federalist Society, which shapes conservative judicial thinking; the pro-market Heritage Foundation; a California-based center skeptical of human-driven climate change; and many other institutions.

All of these organizations, unknown to 99% of the population, and their common source of support, unknown to most of the rest, have provided the grist for conservative thinking since Reagan.

Here’s a bit more, about how they run the business empire, which they created almost from scratch. Wouldn’t you LOVE to work for a boss like this???

Koch Industries essentially applies the ideas of Friedrich Hayek to the art of making money. Hayek, the dean of the so-called Austrian School of economists, celebrated the chaos of decentralized decision-making as a way for every individual to decide what’s in his or her best self-interest.

So while ownership is concentrated in the hands of two men, Charles – who has had management control since his father designated him as chief executive in 1967 – tries to train each of the company’s 60,000 employees to act as if they own the portion of the business they oversee. The Kochs have trademarked their take on Hayek: Market Based Management.

Koch Industries has no centralized pay scale. It doesn’t peg bonuses to firm-wide profitability, and even the salaries of machine operators are often calculated in part on how efficiently they run the processes they oversee.

Middle managers can earn far more than their base salary in bonuses, which are determined partly by the long-term return on the capital they invest.

Market Based Management dictates that they can earn far more by turning around a faltering business than by playing it safe in a consistently profitable one. “We try to evaluate how much value an employee is creating here and reward them accordingly,” says Charles, in an inversion of Karl Marx’s famous equation.

Charles, who used to give his children Sunday afternoon economics lectures, styles himself as a professor who manages more by the Socratic method than by decree, probing managers with questions designed to steer them toward long-term interests. Employees, unsurprisingly, like controlling their own destiny, even in heavily industrial, unionized businesses. Thirty percent of Koch’s 50,000 U.S. employees are in unions, yet the company’s last significant strike was in 1993.

1. They are successful where the left always fails
2. They respect individuality where the left despises the individual
3. They believe in freedom where the left believes in totalitarianism and rule by the elite.
3. The Kochs are generally smarter then anyone on the left. Actually a ball of mud is generally smarter then anyone on the left.angrywebmaster recently posted..Moonbat deal of the century!

I actually spoke to Tom Massie the other night at a function. He told me that the aid bill to Ukraine passed very quickly both in initial draft in the House as well as the Senate committee. He had a problem with it, because it was essentially a blank check. I told him that wasn’t a good idea, since the new government in Ukraine is about as corrupt as the old government. At the very least we need to specify how it is to be spent, and cap the fucking thing. He also told me that they will have a chance to stop it again once it comes back to the House. Now the hold up is not the fucking Koch Brothers, ferfuckssake, but the IMF. “Secretary of State John Kerry is calling on lawmakers to include IMF reform as a critical part of a loan package to Ukraine, but some House Republicans are skeptical.”

Obama has been screeching about reforms to the IMF and has demanded that the aid package include changes that would allow dictator-run leech countries developing countries a greater say in the IMF structure. Fuck that!

Goddamn Reid is so fucking stupid, I have to wonder if he’s been slipping Debbie Wasserman Schultz the hot beef injection and caught a case of the fuckwit from her!LC Nicki the Resident Misanthropic Bitch recently posted..Cowards, Corruption, and Conventions

In all fairness to Reid, he probably had no idea what he was saying as he appears to be suffering from senile dementia. He was just mindlessly reading what an aid placed in front of him. In fact, he probably has to be heavily medicated to keep from rambling off pointless stories on the Senate floor, like about the time he took the ferry into town so he tied an onion to his belt, which was the fashion at the time… Blame the people of Nevada for electing someone that needs a full time chin-wiper.

JonB @ # 10
Jon, you are making what I believe to be a false assumption, and that is that Reid, Pelosi, et. al, even have souls. Even assuming your premise is correct, I don’t think Satan would care to purchase said souls from those people. Satan has been trading for millennia, do you think he would trade for something as worthless as Reid … or Pelosi, Schumer, Boxer, Feinstein, McCain, Franken, McConnell, Boehner, or Obama?